Review: JustSim Nice Cote d’Azur

Introduction

Nice. The gateway to the splendid South France and Monaco. The city is one of the most famous Mediterranean summer locations, and is frequented by the rich and famous, as well as ordinary folk looking for some sun. LFMN has been done before, several times, but the most famous rendition before Justsim was done by Aerosoft back in 2011. Now we have an up to date depiction of this busy airport.

Nice Cote d’Azur Airport handled just over 12 million passengers in 2015. Of course, the busiest time of the year is summer. Air France, Hop!, and Easyjet are the most frequent visitors to the airport, however many other airlines come to say hello on a year-round or seasonal basis.

Installation

Nice installer is the standard Simmarket installer. It does everything for you, and all you have to do is make sure that you select the correct flight simulator once asked to do so. The installation process will create all the necessary folders in your main addon scenery folder and will add the scenery to your scenery library. The scenery also comes with SODE functionality that is needed for the airport to function properly (animations). You will have to make sure that you install the latest SODE, but the installer makers this easy by prompting you to install it during the scenery installation process.

Apart from the scenery files, the installation will save 2 pdf files into the installation directory. One is the manual in English and the other is the charts for LFMN. The installation directory will also contain the SODE v1.3.3 executable. You should ensure that the latest SODE has been installed as it is responsible for the appearance of lights, trees, grass and other objects at the airport.

Detail and Texturing

The first thing you will notice once you load up the airport is how alive it is. There are a lot of apron vehicles moving about and it does add to the immersion. While there are vehicles around, it is not overcrowded. JustSim have struck the right balance between not enough and too many vehicles being shown, and this does reflect on the performance of the scenery.

The scenery itself does not come with any static aircraft (unless they are well hidden), and as a fan of static-free airports, this is good news to me. So if you want to see planes, you will have to get them into your sim by yourself.

Textures are sharp and well defined. The buildings look solid and some parts, like the air-bridges are done in 3D. However, the terminal buildings themselves are not 3D, which is what helps the scenery to perform better.

LFMN Day Images

The product does not cover the city of Nice itself, however, the design of it ensures that it blends in very well with the surrounding terrain. Judging by the ORBX logo on the promotional images, and the words “EU Cityscape Cote d’Azur” we can assume that LFMN was designed to blend in with the upcoming ORBX release. But even if you do not get Cityscape, you will not be shortchanged.

LFMN @ Dawn

At dusk, dawn and night, the airport, with the surrounding area looks spectacular. The apron and runways are well lit, and the light poles do look very nice. The only downside, in my opinion, is that the terminal buildings are not as well lit as I would expect. While there is some lighting on the buildings, it does seem too dark. Maybe a patch can correct this, or maybe this is how it is in real life.

LFMN @ Dusk

One other issue that I encountered, and this could just be my setup, are the dreaded flickering textures. They do tend to be quite noticeable on air-bridges especially. It is not a deal breaker as far as the overall scenery quality is concerned, but it does take away a bit of the shine from it.

LFMN @ Night

Performance

For such a sizable and relatively complex airport and the location of it (surrounded by a lot of autogen buildings), LFMN runs very very smooth. No issues with low frame rates, or stuttering were noticeable during the review. Maybe I can go as far as to say that the scenery runs better than the default one. Of course, if you add a lot of AI aircraft, there will be a price to pay, but if you are reasonable and only add some planes to make the place look alive you will be very happy with the smoothness.

As you can see in the image above, VAS usage peaked at 56%, and this was after running the sim for well over 30 minutes at the airport.

REVIEW OVERVIEW

Installation

Texturing

Detailing

Performance

Value for Money

SUMMARY

Pros

Excellent performance for the size of the area

Great attention to details and building modelling

No static aircraft

Blends in seamlessly with the surroundings

Cons

Texture flickering at some locations

Night lighting could be better

Overall, JustSim have done a brilliant job of developing Nice for us simmers to enjoy. It is a modern take on the old favorite airport for many flight simulation enthusiasts. The scenery runs smooth, is well designed and textured, and provides very good value for money. There are some minor issues with texture flickering and lighting, but it is not enough to reduce the value you will get from it.